My most recent work concerns color, the nature of consciousness, and metaethics. I have published papers in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mathematics. For a list of my publications see my cv.
These are some papers that I have written or am currently woking on. Comments are of course welcome. Please do not quote without permission. All material copyright Mark Eli Kalderon unless otherwise specified.
- Logicism and the Sense-Denotation Distinction
- Color and the Problem of Perceptual Presence
- Seeing Red
- Precis of Moral Fictionalism and Responses
- Morality: Fact or Fiction?
- Moral Fictionalism, the Frege–Geach Problem, and Reasonable Inference
- The Multiply Qualitative
- Epistemic Relativism
- Metamerism, Constancy, and Knowing Which
- Respecting Value
- Color Pluralism
- Moral Fictionalism
- Groundwork for a Nonconcessive Expressivism
- How Not to be a Normative Irrealist
- Open Questions and the Manifest Image
- Reasoning and Representing
- Color and the Inverted Spectrum
Logicism and the Sense-Denotation Distinction
A draft of a paper that will probably never be published. It discusses the connection between Frege’s philosophy of mathematics and his philosophy of language. I argue that the sense-denotation distinction is intimately connected with Frege’s logicist program.
Logicism and the Sense-Denotation Distinction
Color and the Problem of Perceptual Presence
Noë believes that the facts of color constancy speaks in favor of a particular view about color experience and a particular view about the metaphysics of color. Though we experience the persistent unaltered color, we strictly speaking see only the variable look or appearance. Moreover, colors are nothing over and above the patterns of variable looks or appearances. Though there is much to admire in Noë’s account of perception—particularly his resistance to any conception of experience as a form of inner representation, his views about color experience and the metaphysics of color are inadequate. Specifically, they fail to account for the very phenomena that motivates them. The root of this difficulty is that Noë has misdescribed color constancy at the outset. A better description of the phenomenology motivates a naïve realism about color and color experience, a naïve realism that retains many of the virtues that Noë claims for his own account.
Color and the Problem of Perceptual Presence
Seeing Red
Radio interview on the color red.
Precis of Moral Fictionalism and Responses
The following are for a forthcoming book symposium on Moral Fictionalism in Philosophical Books Precis Replies
Morality: Fact or Fiction?
A talk delivered to an audience of non-philosophers that makes explicit the normative (as opposed to metaethical) motivations behind Moral Fictionalism:
Alarmed by the growing intransigence of public moral discussion, I undertook to describe in Moral Fictionalism what moral practice would become if such intransigence became entrenched in the norms governing public moral discourse. Moral Fictionalism, then, is a dystopian metaphysics, a metaphysical parable about the debilitating effects of moral intransigence. It is an account of what moral practice would become if we lack sufficient respect to try to understand one another. Our moral judgments would be a self-portrait of our partial concerns, the expression of our emotional attitudes—what Kant calls empirical motives. And as Kant long ago warned: `human reason it its weariness gladly rests on this pillow and in a dream of sweet illusions (which allow it to embrace a cloud instead of Juno) it substitutes for a morality a bastard patched up from limbs of quite diverse ancestry, which looks like whatever onin it but not like virtue for him who has seen virtue in her true form’.
Moral Fictionalism, the Frege–Geach Problem, and Reasonable Inference
One advantage of a fictionalist noncognitivism is that is not subject to the same semantic difficulties that the Frege–Geach problem poses for standard noncognitivism. But some, Matti Eklund prominent among them, have argued that the Frege–Geach problem arises in a new form for moral fictionalism. I argue that this is less of a problem than a reasonable query—a query that the account in Moral Fictionalism has the resources to answer. The following is the text of a talk to be delivered at St Andrews, 5 May 2007, and accompanying slides.
The Multiply Qualitative
Updated February 16, 2007
A response to Sydney Shoemaker’s “Content, Character, and Color”. Whereas “Metamerism, Constancy, and Knowing Which” argues that different qualitative aspects of a color are perceptually available to a perceiver in different circumstances of perception, the present paper argues that different qualitative aspects of a color are perceptually available to different perceivers in the same circumstance of perception. Understanding how this could be so undermines Shoemaker’s criticisms. The Multiply Qualitative
Epistemic Relativism
A critical review of Paul Boghossian’s Fear of Knowledge. I argue that the central argument against epistemic relativism fails and that even if the arguments of Fear of Knowledge worked perfectly on their own terms, Fear of Knowledge would fail to persuade the relativistically inclined. EpistemicRelativism
Metamerism, Constancy, and Knowing Which
Updated July 12, 2007 Rewrote first section; dropped discussion of phenomenalism; expanded discussion of tertiary qualities; added discussion of veridical illusion. Updated February 16, 2007 Added section on dispositionalism and color constancy.
I argue that color experience must have a presentational phenomenology if it has the epistemic properties it manifestly has. Metamerism, Constancy, and Knowing Which
Respecting Value
A paper presented to the conference In Pursuit of Reason: Engaging Joseph Raz on Reason and Value, May 12 2006, Institute of Philosophy, University of London. Raz describes his views as having a Kantian origin. This might raise the eyebrow of some neo-Kantians or anyone inclined to interpret Kant as a formalist or as a constructivist. Nevertheless, I believe that Raz’s views and Kant’s, properly interpreted and developed, have more in common than even Raz suspects. To bring this out, I will take up three questions that Raz raises concerning Kant’s doctrine:
- Why is there no analogue of the feeling of respect in Kant’s treatment of theoretical reason?
- What is the proper object of respect: the moral law or people considered as ends in themselves?
- How could people be ends, let alone ends in themselves, if ends are states of affairs intentionally brought about by action?
Color Pluralism
Updated February 16, 2007
A long planned sequel to ‘Color and the Inverted Spectrum’. The problem of the manifest with respect to the colors can be posed as follows—How can the colors, given their perceived nature, be materially realized by surfaces, volumes, and radiant light sources as they seem, pre-philosophically to be? I sketch a solution to this problem, at least as it is posed by a specific argument. If the sketched solution is intelligible, let alone true, then it is an open question whether the mind/body problem, as presently understood, is an illusion. Color Pluralism
Moral Fictionalism
Two sample chapters from my book, Moral Fictionalism. These were chosen to emphasize an important subnarrative of the book.
Moral Pyrrhonism and Noncognitivism
An epistemic, as opposed to a motivational, argument for noncognitivism. Moral Pyrrhonism and Noncognitivism
Attitude, Affect, and Authority
Explores the consequences of the discovery, if it is one, that morality is a fiction. Attitude, Affect, and Authority
Groundwork for a Nonconcessive Expressivism
A reply to Paul Horwich’s “The Frege-Geach Point”, a talk presented to SOFIA XVI, Ought! Horwich denies that the Frege-Geach problem is a good objection and thus spends a lot of time diagnosing why theorists have been taken in by it. Whether or not it is a good objection depends on what its proper object is. In contrast to Horwich, I think that it is good objection to a natural form that expressivist accounts may take, and its enduring challenge to the expressivist is to give accounts of meaning that do not take this natural if problematic form. This might seem like a mere difference in emphasis, but it is a difference in emphasis that affects the dialectical situation: From Horwich’s perspective, it is natural to focus on establishing the possibility of a nonconcessive expressivism; from the perspective I recommend, it is natural instead to focus on actually giving these nonconcessive expressivist explanations. Indeed, subsequent discussion suggests that actually giving such explanations might be the only way of establishing their possibility. Groundwork for a Nonconcessive Expressivism
How Not to be a Normative Irrealist
A reply to Jimmy Lenman’s “Scanlon’s Normative Realism” delivered at Reasonable Questioning: Scanlon and the Contractualist Picture of Morality a conference organized by Véronique Munoz-Dardé. How Not to Be a Normative Irrealist
Open Questions and the Manifest Image
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, March 2004, 68/2: 251–289 copyright International Phenomenological Society. I argue that the open question argument and Frege’s puzzle (understood as a reductio of Millianism) are variants of the same argument. Once the parallel is appreciated, much of the standard commentary on the open question argument and its role in the case for nonnaturalism is inadequate. Not only do we learn something about the open question argument, but so too do we learn something about Frege’s puzzle: I argue that both are unsound for the same general reason. Open Questions and the Manifest Image
Reasoning and Representing
Philosophical Studies, August 2001, 105/2: 129–60 copyright Springer. I argue that given the best explanation of our logical understanding, some version of inferential role semantics must be the correct account of the determinants of logical content. Reasoning and Representing
Color and the Inverted Spectrum
With David Hilbert in Steven Davis ed. Color Perception: Philosophical, Psychological, Artistic and Computational Perspectives, Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science, 9, 2000, copyright OUP. We argue that the extant versions of the inverted spectrum argument are unsound and that any possible version must also be. We outline a conceptual role semantics for color perception and give an intentionalist reduction of color phenomenology in terms of color content so conceived. Color and the Inverted Spectrum
